How Doctors Think

On average, a physician will interrupt a patient describing her symptoms within 12 seconds. In that short time, many doctors decide on the likely diagnosis and best treatment. Often, decisions made this way are correct, but at crucial moments they can also be wrong: with catastrophic consequences. In this myth-shattering book, Jerome Groopman pinpoints the forces and thought processes behind the decisions doctors make.

Every Patient Tells a Story: Medical Mysteries and the Art of Diagnosis

In Every Patient Tells a Story, Dr. Lisa Sanders takes us bedside to witness the process of solving diagnostic dilemmas, providing a firsthand account of the expertise and intuition that lead a doctor to make the right diagnosis.

One Doctor: Close Calls, Cold Cases, and the Mysteries of Medicine

An epic story told by a unique voice in Ameri­can medicine, One Doctor describes life-changing experiences in the career of a distinguished physi­cian. In riveting first-person prose, Dr. Brendan Reilly takes us to the front lines of medicine today.

Ezekiel J. Emanuel, a professor of medical ethics and health policy at the University of Pennsylvania who also served as a special adviser to the White House on health-care reform, has written a brilliant diagnostic explanation of why health care in America has become such a divisive social issue, how money and medicine have their own American story, and why reform has bedeviled presidents of the left and right for more than one hundred years.

The Digital Doctor: Hope, Hype, and Harm at the Dawn of Medicine's Computer Age

While modern medicine produces miracles, it also delivers care that is too often unsafe, unreliable, unsatisfying, and impossibly expensive. For the past few decades, technology has been touted as the cure for all of healthcare's ills. But medicine stubbornly resisted computerization - until now. Over the past five years, thanks largely to billions of dollars in federal incentives, health care has finally gone digital.

Food: A Cultural Culinary History

Eating is an indispensable human activity. As a result, whether we realize it or not, the drive to obtain food has been a major catalyst across all of history, from prehistoric times to the present. Epicure Jean-Anthelme Brillat-Savarin said it best: "Gastronomy governs the whole life of man."

The Aging Brain

We're all getting older every day, and scientific research has shown that starting in our 20s, some brain functions begin a linear decline. But is old age all doom and gloom? Not at all! While it's true that some functions in the aging brain decline, neuroscientists have discovered that many other brain functions remain stable - or even improve - as we age.

Retirementology: Rethinking the American Dream in a New Economy

Looking ahead to retirement? Depending on your circumstances and your age, you may no longer have any margin for error. And your emotions and irrational behavior could be perpetuating a dangerous cycle of overspending and rising debt that may shatter whatever vision of retirement you still have. Welcome to the world of Retirementology.

Why Zebras Don't Get Ulcers: The Acclaimed Guide to Stress, Stress-Related Diseases, and Coping - Now Revised and Updated

Now in a third edition, Robert M. Sapolsky's acclaimed and successful Why Zebras Don't Get Ulcers features new chapters on how stress affects sleep and addiction, as well as new insights into anxiety and personality disorder and the impact of spirituality on managing stress. As Sapolsky explains, most of us do not lie awake at night worrying about whether we have leprosy or malaria. Instead, the diseases we fear-and the ones that plague us now-are illnesses brought on by the slow accumulation of damage, such as heart disease and cancer.

Memorizing Pharmacology: A Relaxed Approach

This easy-to-listen guide organizes pharmacology into manageable, logical steps you can fit in short pockets of time. The proven system helps you memorize medications quickly and form immediate connections. With mnemonics from students and instructors, you'll see how both sides approach learning. After you've finished the 200 Top Drugs in this book, reading pharmacology exam questions will seem like reading plain English.

Born Standing Up: A Comic's Life

In the mid-70s, Steve Martin exploded onto the comedy scene. By 1978 he was the biggest concert draw in the history of stand-up. In 1981 he quit forever. Born Standing Up is, in his own words, the story of "why I did stand-up and why I walked away".

The Residence: Inside the Private World of the White House

America's first families are unknowable in many ways. No one has insight into their true character like the people who serve their meals and make their beds every day. Full of stories and details by turns dramatic, humorous, and heartwarming, The Residence reveals daily life in the White House as it is really lived through the voices of the maids, butlers, cooks, florists, doormen, engineers, and others who tend to the needs of the president and first family.

Contagious: Why Things Catch On

Why do some products get more word of mouth than others? Why does some online content go viral? Word of mouth makes products, ideas, and behaviors catch on. It's more influential than advertising and far more effective. Can you create word of mouth for your product or idea? According to Berger, you can. Whether you operate a neighborhood restaurant, a corporation with hundreds of employees, or are running for a local office for the first time, the steps that can help your product or idea become viral are the same.

What Every BODY Is Saying: An Ex-FBI Agent’s Guide to Speed-Reading People

Listen to this book and send your nonverbal intelligence soaring. Joe Navarro, a former FBI counterintelligence officer and a recognized expert on nonverbal behavior, explains how to "speed-read" people: decode sentiments and behaviors, avoid hidden pitfalls, and look for deceptive behaviors. You'll also learn how your body language can influence what your boss, family, friends, and strangers think of you.

I Wasn't Strong Like This When I Started Out: True Stories of Becoming a Nurse

This collection of true narratives reflects the dynamism and diversity of nurses who provide the first vital line of patient care. Here, nurses remember their first "sticks", first births, and first deaths and reflect on what gets them though long, demanding shifts and keeps them in the profession.

Alpha Docs: The Making of a Cardiologist

It takes drive, persistence, and plenty of stamina to practice cardiology at the highest level. The competition for training fellowship spots is intense. Hundreds of applicants from all over the world compete to be accepted into the Cardiovascular Disease Training Fellowship at Johns Hopkins. Only nine are chosen each year. This is the story of one of those fellows.

Wishful Drinking

In Wishful Drinking, Carrie Fisher tells the true and intoxicating story of her life with inimitable wit. Born to celebrity parents, she was picked to play a princess in a little movie called Star Wars when only 19 years old. "But it isn't all sweetness and light sabers."

Overdiagnosed: Making People Sick in Pursuit of Health

Going against the conventional wisdom reinforced by the medical establishment and Big Pharma that more screening is the best preventative medicine, Dr. Gilbert Welch builds a compelling counterargument that what we need are fewer, not more, diagnoses. Documenting the excesses of American medical practice that labels far too many of us as sick, Welch examines the social, ethical, and economic ramifications of a health-care system that unnecessarily diagnoses and treats patients.

The Real Doctor Will See You Shortly: A Physician's First Year

In medical school, Matt McCarthy dreamed of being a different kind of doctor - the sort of mythical, unflappable physician who could reach unreachable patients. But when a new admission to the critical care unit almost died his first night on call, he found himself scrambling. Visions of mastery quickly gave way to hopes of simply surviving hospital life, where confidence was hard to come by and no amount of med school training could dispel the terror of facing actual patients.

Lights and Sirens: The Education of a Paramedic

Nine months of tying tourniquets and pushing new medications, of IVs, chest compressions, and defibrillator shocks - that was Kevin Grange's initiation into emergency medicine when, at age 36, he enrolled in the "Harvard of paramedic schools": UCLA's Daniel Freeman paramedic program, long considered one of the best and most intense paramedic training programs in the world.

Amazon Customer says:"if your looking into EMS as a career DO READ!!!i"

Pharmaceutical Drugs AudioLearn: A Complete Review of the 500 Most Commonly Prescribed Medications in the United States (Pharmacy Study Guides)

Whether you're a medical professional, nursing or pharmacy student looking to learn more about key drug names, indications or side effects, Pharmaceutical Drugs AudioLearn can become your complete medications memorizer - featuring more than 500 commonly prescribed medications and narrated by a medical doctor, you can be sure to learn the correct pronunciation for each drug name and term.

Kathleen M. Scheirer says:"RECYCLED FROM ANOTHER BOOK - MANY OUTDATED DRUGS"

A Lucky Life Interrupted: A Memoir of Hope

From Tom Brokaw, the best-selling author of The Greatest Generation, comes a powerful memoir of a year of dramatic change - a year spent battling cancer and reflecting on a long, happy, and lucky life.

The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined

We’ve all had the experience of reading about a bloody war or shocking crime and asking, “What is the world coming to?” But we seldom ask, “How bad was the world in the past?” In this startling new book, the best-selling cognitive scientist Steven Pinker shows that the world of the past was much worse. In fact, we may be living in the most peaceable era in our species’ existence.

The Patient Will See You Now: The Future of Medicine Is in Your Hands

In The Patient Will See You Now, Eric Topol, one of the nation's top physicians, examines what he calls medicine's "Gutenberg moment". Much as the printing press liberated knowledge from the control of an elite class, new technology is poised to democratize medicine. In this new era, patients will control their data and be emancipated from a paternalistic medical regime in which "the doctor knows best."

Publisher's Summary

Your doctor suggests you take a drug to lower your blood pressure, but you’ve read that it has risky side effects for some patients. Do you take the drug given the risks it entails, or do you risk living with high blood pressure? The answers to questions like this can be maddeningly—even dangerously—elusive, because our best interests are often hidden by our doctors’ preferences, drug companies’ propaganda, the vagaries of the healthcare system, and especially by our own anxieties, ideals, personal histories, and cognitive foibles.

As patients, each of us falls at some point along each of three spectrums: believer vs. doubter, naturalistic vs. technological, and narrative vs. numbers (that is, some put their faith in stories, others in statistics). Knowing where our personalities place us along these spectrums allows us to determine whether, say, a wait-and-see approach might make us feel better, physically and psychologically, than an intensive treatment, or whether our doctor is well or poorly suited to our needs and attitudes. Crucially, understanding our own personalities also alerts us to cognitive obstacles that might trip us up while making decisions about our care.

Drs. Groopman and Hartzband provide groundbreaking guidance any patient can use to tailor their medical choices to their own physical and emotional needs.

I think anyone who wants to understand making the realities of making medical decisions needs to understand the cases in this book. No simple answers here, and that's the point.

I'm deeply into the fields of shared decision making and patient autonomy, from the patient's perspective and as co-chair of the Society for Participatory Medicine. This isn't a lightweight book - the issues and cases presented are serious and thought provoking, at times heart-breaking - but it's highly readable and, as with Groopman's other books I've read (Anatomy of Hope, How Doctors Think), eminently understandable.

I like that he's joined here by his wife, also an MD, and that they start by sharing their own different preferences in decision making, arising out of their different upbringings.

They present principles and challenges, and then illustrate them with cases. Each is presented as it unfolded in reality, with no certainty about how things would go - because that's how it is in real time, for both the physician and the patient. (Any physician who asserts certainty is either blowing smoke, or lying, or misguided in his/her own sureness, because *nothing* is absolutely certain.)

At times I picked up what seemed to be signals that not every doctor who urges you to do something may be acting with *your* interests as the #1 priority. That can add to the reality of the uncertainty you face. But even in the best of circumstances, as you face decisions and plan for your own end of life, you just don't know, and it's best for all to understand this as part of the fabric of life.

If you were to make a film of this book, what would be the tag line be?

Help!

Any additional comments?

I have had two big decisions to make about medical treatment for myself this year. I have made those decisions with the help of this book. I have great trouble actually reading self help books. I like to read to escape my own life and venture into other lives, but the information to be found here is most valuable. Doctors have so little time to spend with their patients these days and most are not as skilled as these two. Thank you, doctors Groopman and Hartzband. The readers have done an excellent job as well.

Your Medical Mind was more case-study oriented and less edu-tainment than some books of it's kind. But, while not a fun listen/read, it did cover an array of medical problems which someone might face. The theory at work here seems to be that if you use this book to explore your medical preferences before you or a loved one is sick, you will be able to make decisions more rationally when/if that time comes. Logic says that thinking about these things before hand should help most people however with all of the symptoms and ailments the authors describe in detail I would warn people off this book who know themselves to be hypochondriacs.

Your Medical Mind was more case-study oriented and less edu-tainment than some books of it's kind. But, while not a fun listen/read, it did cover an array of medical problems which someone might face. The theory at work here seems to be that if you use this book to explore your medical preferences before you or a loved one is sick, you will be able to make decisions more rationally when/if that time comes. Logic says that thinking about these things before hand should help most people however with all of the symptoms and ailments the authors describe in detail I would warn people off this book who know themselves to be hypochondriacs.

Would you try another book from Jerome Groopman and Pamela Hartzband and/or Linda Emond and Cotter Smith ?

Yes: It is very interesting to see how our experience influences current thoughts. It is also very interesting to know the different factors that are affecting peoples thought processes.

Who was your favorite character and why?

No favorite character. One observation that may affect things: many of these people were educated and successful; more likely to challenge. I am a healthcare worker and deal with many people who are overwhelmed by these circumstances. They are much less likely to be challenging. Many older folks are submissive without questioning, they need the younger family members that are going to ask questions and do research.

Would you listen to another book narrated by Linda Emond and Cotter Smith ?

Yes they were quite good I would listen them as a team or individually.

Did Your Medical Mind inspire you to do anything?

As a healthcare worker I was aware of many of these things. It was a confirmation of my thoughts and observations over the years.

Any additional comments?

We all have to arm ourselves with information on our health issues. We most be empowered to ask questions and take control of our healthcare.

I am guessing that you are like me and have hit some obstacle and need information. For me the obstacle came in the form of someone close with severe medical problems. Read books on how doctors think, how hospitals work, malpractice and so on. This book helps you decide what is right for you, medically, and making those decisions. I can't be objective about this book because I needed something to help my decision making in medical matters. This book helped my perspective and helped give me the tools and the outlook to take matters in hand. This book helped me balance decision making while taking in other related matters and combining the information. I am glad I read this book.